Quick Tips

Hello blogosphere! As I’m working on putting my bash scripts together, here’s a few quick tips that one may use in everyday life.

Background Command

Ever started a program in the terminal because it doesn’t have a menu listing, or need to see it’s error output and then realize later that you need the terminal? Opening another tab is simple enough but you really don’t need the program hogging the terminal anymore. Well, there is a way to do this.

Previously, people may have viewed my bash script that can start programs in the terminal in the background. Already running applications can be backgrounded as well. First type ctrl-Z to release the application, then using the bg program will background it’s output.

Gnome’s Middle-Click, Title-Bar Trick

For the long time I’ve been using Gnome and just learned about this one. A quick way to look at a window below the current on is to middle-click on title bar. Voila! The current window izzz lowered. More tricks can be found on Gnome Tip’s and Tricks page.

Firefox Hunt

I have the tendency that once I’m on the keyboard, I like to stay on the keyboard, so doing a search in Firefox by going to the mouse selecting the search engine, and typing in the field seems like extra legwork to me. To do a fast search in Firefox on the keyboard is as easy as: ctrl-K to move to the search box and alt-up/down to select the search engine.

Grep Two Search Terms

On the occasion that a grep search needs to look for two words, egrep it:

egrep -w 'word1|word2' /path/to/file

Fox in Hounds Teeth

This is personal advice, but take it from me – worth it. Don’t use Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizing Service. I used this service as I sold my old computer when I got the new. I trusted this service to hold my web bookmarks and… it didn’t. It errored with the line, “Can’t synchronize bookmarks, transfer error.” I asked about the error and only got the explanation that, “…this sometimes happens”. Also I got no explanation on why or what happened to their backup service.

There’s another Bookmark Synchronizer out there but for the life of me can’t remember the name of it. Anyone?

Thunar Custom Actions

Thunar has the ability to create custom scripts built directly into it. For the most part it’s self explanatory. For greater degree of difficultly scripts, here’s the documentation.

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linuxtidbits is a place for common bits of Linux knowledge. Linux is a good operating system with good people. Being part of Linux, to me, means being a part of something that everyone can contribute to.